"Long Strange Trip" documents how The Grateful Dead found its sound and made Jerry Garcia a reluctant leader. "Wait Wait Don't Kill Me" is a podcast musical that satirizes the podcast "Serial," but it's also about our fascination with true crime and murder. Can Snapchat build an audience for short form shows by well-known TV celebs like Conan O'Brien?
Grateful Dead doc director says 'Long Strange Trip' isn't just for Deadheads
The new documentary, “Long Strange Trip," is an epic, four-hour-long film about The Grateful Dead and its reluctant leader — guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia. Filmmaker Amir Bar Lev says that people who are unfamiliar with the band's music will find something about the community and the ethics of the band valuable: "I think about Jerry's idea of leadership a lot in this moment we're in, where we have a narcissist for a president in a narcissistic culture."
The film taps into a wealth of archival footage to tell the story of how The Grateful Dead found its sound and community, and rebuffed the traditional music industry in the process.
The film largely focuses on Garcia, who put together the group in the 1960s and was a reluctant leader and father figure. Garcia died in 1995, but there is a lot of archival footage of him in the film, in addition to interviews with his survivors and the living members of The Dead.
Bar-Lev ("The Tillman Story," "Happy Valley") originally pitched himself to make this film more than 11 years ago. He told The Frame's John Horn that the documentary took a long time to come to fruition, in part because of the non-traditional way that the band runs its business and makes decisions.
Interview highlights:
On the challenge of documenting a band that defies categorization:
They don't want to be defined and categorized and put in a little box because The Grateful Dead is this protean, malleable thing. It's not meant to be any one thing. And so if you come in with a documentary pitch and say, This is what you guys are, then it doesn't go far. And then if you don't do that, it takes 11 years and you get to do it.
On how the narrative structure of "Long Strange Trip" is like "The Wire":
I'm interested in complementary points-of-view. When you're watching 'The Wire,' you know when you're with McNulty, you're like, This is it. This is the protagonist. This is the guy I'm with. But then when you're with his antagonists you realize his shortcomings and then your perspective clocks around. And that's the only way to understand The Grateful Dead family.
On how Jerry Garcia invited people into his life who "had perspectives that weren't his":
When Jerry put the band together, he picked them because they were an eclectic group of people that didn't make sense. Phil Lesh should never have played the bass. They all came from different [music] backgrounds. And Jerry had started as a virtuoso who used to listen to old bluegrass records in half-time and slavishly imitate the guitar or banjo solos. And then a bunch of things happened to him, including Ken Kesey's acid tests, and he realized he didn't want to slavishly imitate things or try to fit into some pre-determined musical idiom. And so he wanted to invite people to go through life with him who had perspectives that weren't his. That's how he put together the band, musically, but that's also how he put together the organization. A lot of Deadheads presented themselves and said, Hey, you know, I'd like to help you do this thing that you're doing, and they were brought in.
On how "Long Strange Trip" isn't just for Deadheads:
The film is not for Deadheads. I surrounded myself with non-Deadheads to make it so that nothing is in the film just because, Oh yeah! That was the "Morning Dew" from Europe '72! It's gotta be a story that makes sense to anybody. Some of the first people that have seen this film are my mother-in-law and father-in-law. I invited them into the edit and they're as square as can be. They're from the Midwest. I was testing out the sound mix on them and they had the reaction that I'm looking for, which is: This is a great story. It's about bigger things than the band. If you think that you don't like The Grateful Dead's music, I welcome you to come see the movie. I bet you I'll change your mind. But even so, it's a story about some big ideas.
On how Jerry Garcia's idea of leadership provides a counterpoint to Trump:
[Garcia] is a guy who people started to worship, who had some interesting ideas about leadership. I think about Jerry's idea of leadership a lot in this moment, where we have a narcissist for a president in a narcissistic culture. And this was a very selfless band – they gave their music away ... this guy was so charismatic and he really mistrusted his own charisma. He eschewed leadership to a degree that was problematic for the people around him. So, for instance, they had a lot of Hell's Angels hanging around and people inside their organization said, Come on, Jerry. Step up. You're the leader here, you're kind of the father figure. Those guys are not part of what The Grateful Dead is, right? And he wouldn't take a stand on that because he felt that The Grateful Dead is whatever it is at that moment and that the collective had to figure it out amongst themselves. Which, to me, is a very American perspective. It's a very pluralistic perspective. And that's why I think they're the great American rock 'n' roll band.
They gave away their music for free, they invited lots of people to participate in it, and they were never in it for the kind of sheen of recognition. So I think there's a story here that I think is relevant for today.
To hear the full interview with Amir Bar-Lev, click the blue player above.
"Long Strange Trip" will be released in theaters on May 26th before streaming on Amazon beginning June 2.
'Wait Wait Don't Kill Me': a podcast musical that (lovingly) satirizes 'Serial'
The annual Webby Awards were handed out last week — think of them as the Oscars for the Internet. This year, a new award was added to the podcast category: best original score. And the winner was truly one of a kind — the first serialized podcast musical.
In the 10-year-old world of podcasts, nothing has been as big a phenomenon as the first season of “Serial” — a whodunit about the real-life murder of a high school girl in Baltimore that was produced by the team behind “This American Life.”
Hosted by Sarah Koenig, “Serial” came out of nowhere in the fall of 2014 and quickly became a water cooler topic. It won a Peabody Award, and that first season has been downloaded more than 175 million times. As "Serial" was coming out, some musical theater guys decided to acknowledge its popularity with a high compliment: parody.
David Holstein is an L.A.-based screenwriter best known for his work on the TV show, “Weeds.”
HOLSTEIN: The Flea in New York has a great late-night program called "Serials," ironically, where they do serialized short plays. And they asked us to come down and do a serialized musical version of "Serial" for cereals. And we started listening to the podcast and thinking what a great thing to spoof. And then as we got into it, we kind of decided it’s actually bigger than a parody, it’s maybe its own crazy monster.
Holstein wrote the script, and New York composer Alan Schmuckler wrote the music and lyrics.
“There’s something arch and ironic about telling a story about murder and about guilt and complicity with the kind of tongue-in-cheek sheen of, Musical theatre! Wackity-schmackity!, says Schmuckler, who has written several traditional musicals, as well as an interactive online musical, also with Holstein.
“There’s hopefully a comic and also disconcerting disconnect, for example, like in the moment when our fictional Sarah Koenig actually commits what may or may not be the murder."
Schmuckler and Holstein were planning on developing their musical in the traditional long, slow Broadway method, when a podcast company called Wondery approached them about doing their podcast satire ... as a podcast.
HOLSTEIN: They basically said, Look, we’ll give you a good chunk of change to get a great Broadway cast, three days in a recording studio — but instead of putting it up on the stage, we want you to record it as a radio play.
“Wait Wait Don’t Kill Me” follows the adventures of a fictional Sarah Koenig, as well as a fictional Ira Glass, and suggests that it was Koenig who committed the murder at the heart of “Serial.” It riffs on many familiar ingredients — from the mispronunciation of MailChimp to the tinny sound of prison phone conversations of the accused in "Serial," Adnan Syed.
SCHMUCKLER: That’s not the sort of thing that you would do if you were doing a live production of this, but it’s a very specific way to paint a sonic picture in this medium that I hadn’t heard before — like a duet across time and space, and through the ether of telephone wire.
You might think it seems tasteless to make comedy out of a real-life murder and imprisonment. Schmuckler and Holstein expected that.
“What the show is trying." says Holstein, “is [to] elevate itself past just a parody or a spoof of ‘Serial,’ but become a bigger indictment of the way Americans are starting to — or I would say have rediscovered — enjoying murder as entertainment. And also, to be clear, we’re like ‘This American Life’ super-fans, and it’s at the same time a love letter to NPR and to ‘Serial.’ And on the other hand asking the question: Well, wait a second ... maybe we shouldn’t be enjoying ourselves this much?”
“Wait Wait Don’t Kill Me” just won the first-ever Webby Award for best original score for a podcast. Holstein says this format is an exciting new way to present musical theatre.
HOLSTEIN: Most people listened to "Hamilton" on Spotify before they actually could afford a ticket or get to see it. So we wanted to kind of reverse engineer that process, and say, if we could release a musical in a different form, where everybody could experience it but not actually pay a ticket to go see it, maybe that would give us a different way to develop a musical.
Holstein and Schmuckler are developing “Wait Wait Don’t Kill Me” as a stage musical. But in the meantime, maybe they’ve created the start of a brand new art form — the podcast musical.